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Mr. Oppernockety. From all indications, Cerf runs a happy shop as well as a contented stable. "They're all prima donnas," he chortles. "We're a firm of prima donnas!" When he tells a visitor that Jason Epstein is "the cross I have to bear," Epstein retorts, "and Bennett is the bear I have to cross." Corporation Secretary Charles A. Wimpfheimer, 38, gets in on the fun now and then. He once installed a parking meter in Cerf's private washroom, probably because Cerf himself started the local bathroom jokes by placing two copies of Lindbergh's autobiography side by side over the toilet, thus: We We.
Most of Cerf's puns and gags are better than bathroom humor—but not much. He tells about the fellow named Kissinger who had his name changed so many times that soon all his friends were asking "I wonder who's Kissinger now?" And about the piano tuner named Oppernockety, who never returns to fix a bad job because Oppernockety only tunes once. Or the Indian chief who was delighted to learn that his two youngsters had been invited to join the yacht club; the chief had always wanted to see his red sons in the sail set. Or the time that Cerf found his little boy about to tear up a copy of The
Wisdom of India; he retrieved it easily —it was like taking Gandhi from a baby.
Some of Cerfs competitors readily suggest that he is a creature of his own publicity, a quipster who has parlayed his way into the publishing pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important he feels it is to have Philip Roth and William Styron on the list. Some other publisher would know a thousand ways to get rich without having one author like that. Bennett Cerf doesn't."
"I Was Delirious!" Cerf started out in an era when big publishers were still considered cultural rather than corporate figures. He was born in Manhattan, the only child of well-off Jewish parents whose ancestors came from France. His father, Gustave, was a successful lithographer who designed ketchup-bottle labels and cigarette cartons, and his mother had a comfortable income from her family's wholesale tobacco business. Neither of these pursuits entranced young Bennett at all. Nor did a literary career. By the time he graduated from Columbia in 1919 with a B.A. degree in journalism and a Phi Beta Kappa key, his mother had died, leaving him $100,000. With nothing better in mind, "Beans," as Cerf was known in those days, joined his uncle's brokerage house as a clerk.
Cerf endured that job for three years, while all around him New York was bursting with bright, talented people; his friends and former classmates were men such as Composers Howard Dietz, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. The theater and Tin Pan Alley were his passions. Says Donald Klopfer, 64, Cerfs Columbia classmate and now vice chairman of the Random House board of directors: